


Showdown

by lopingloup



Series: Whumptober 2018 [31]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bleeding, Blood and Injury, Brother Feels, Brothers, Emotional Hurt, Fights, Gen, Hurt Loki (Marvel), Hurt No Comfort, Jotunn Loki (Marvel), Loki's Scepter (Marvel), Magic, Mind Control, Mind Manipulation, POV Loki (Marvel), Paralysis, Whump, blood from the eyes nose mouth and ears, only small mention, well hurt and little comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-15 03:57:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20859854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lopingloup/pseuds/lopingloup
Summary: Loki, ambushed by the Avengers and weakened by the sceptre, ends up having a long-overdue talk with Thor. Cue angst :)





	Showdown

**Author's Note:**

> FINAL WHUMPTOBER WHOOP. Here we are!!! This has been written for months, it was just Caregiver i was struggling to finish. It's only short but i hope you enjoy! <3 <3

Loki stood poised, tense as a trip wire with the sceptre clenched in his hand. The archer, blue-eyed and under Loki’s compulsion, was at his side and ready to kill whatever was coming, because something was.

Loki flexed a sweating hand around the weapon he hated, and yet the thought of being separated from it caused a paralysing fear far worse than the awful pain it caused. The vibrations of its power meant a constant, bruising ache in his bones, making him feel ill.

“Brother, it-“ a loud, familiar voice called out across the warehouse, the rumbling timbre echoing. Loki saw a faint flicker of movement and even before he could will it, the archer had loosed three arrows with unerring accuracy. The figure fell back behind a pillar, out of sight, and the arrows hit the floor with a clack of metal. The sceptre trembled in Loki’s hand, throbbing with poisonous energy.

Loki’s eyes were wide as he searched for the signs of the next attack, the blue of his foul Jotun form threatening to break through on his clenched knuckles. He shivered, unable to stop himself. He used to be able to master himself, to reinvent himself endlessly, but now he could barely hold himself together with the pain of the sceptre’s toxic power shaking his core apart.

“Loki!” the voice called out and Loki exhaled shakily as he remembered who said his name like that. _Fuck_, he thought, tired. “Brother, I mean you-”

“We are _not_ brothers!” Loki snarled, his fingers tightening around the loathsome sceptre until blue shivered over his skin with a crackle of thin ice and pain vibrated all through his shoulder.

There was a silence and Loki jerked his chin at the archer, _Finna ok drépa hann! _he silently ordered the mortal. The language was wrong but the archer understood: Thor was to be found and pierced through with arrows, the Norns-damned bastard. It wouldn’t kill him but maybe it would drive him out.

“You’re my brother-” Thor growled, anger curling beneath his words.

“I am no-” Loki snapped, partly because of his own weary, hurt fury and partly because it was to his advantage to keep Thor talking; so that the sound of Thor’s voice would help the archer find him.

“_We are!_” Thor shouted. “We grew up together, you are my brother; I will not allow you to take our childhood from me.”

Sick with pain and furious enough to break stone, Loki bared his teeth. “_I hated you, _I always despised you-”

“Liar! You lie to yourself, Loki- brother, lay down your weapon-”

“You think-”

“-whatever demands you have-”

“I have nothing to say-”

“-we will _talk about it_. I know I dismissed you, brother- that I did not listen-” Loki snorted and rolled his eyes, as if his head wasn’t throbbing with pain. Why hadn’t the archer shot the fool yet? What the delay?

“I will be better,” Thor promised, as painfully, stupidly earnest as he’d always sounded, when he wasn’t being an arrogant arse. “I will listen. Please, Loki, lay down your weapon- talk to me, brother. I love you, I always loved you, even when I didn’t show it, and hurt you.” Thor was briefly silent and Loki swallowed thickly, wishing he could sit down, wishing that the archer would stop Thor from talking like that, like he’d actually learnt, finally.

“You do not deserve to speak to me,” he spat weakly. _I do not deserve your kinship_, he thought.

There was silence and Loki waited in hope of Thor’s careless anger, his rash selfishness.

But there was only a heavy sigh that sounded like a man who cared too much and was tired, not the irritated sigh of the spoilt prince that he’d once been.

“Perhaps not, brother-”

Loki bristled at the address, frustrated with Thor’s persistent use of it, as if nothing had changed. “Do you even know what you call ‘brother’?” he sneered. _What is that damn archer doing?_ he thought furiously.

“_You _are my brother, Loki,” Thor said, far too softly. “There is no version of you I do not love.” Loki’s eyes stung and he glared at the concrete floor and shook. He didn’t have the strength for this. His mind was not what it had been. _He_ wasn’t who he used to be.

“You call me liar but you are a fool,” he breathed. He saw a stirring at the edge of the warehouse wall and tensed, staring at it, but it didn’t move again. “Where are your mortal pets?” he demanded, warily scanning the area. Thor wouldn’t be here alone, would he?

“They are my friends, Loki. They want peace, too.”

“Step out of the shadows, coward, and I shall show you peace,” Loki said.

Thor dared to laugh, sad as it was. “I used to be goaded so easily, but not so now. I have had my share of war, and I know you have also. Tell me what you want.”

“You do not know me if you believe for a moment that I will subject myself to their _justice_, or allow their scorn.” Loki was rigid, watching for the attack he was sure was coming. Thor was a distraction.

“I know. Just- please, talk to me. Tell me why you are doing this. Tell me how to help. Advise me, brother; you were talented at that, though I ignored it too often.”

“I manipulated you,” Loki hissed.

“Yes,” Thor snapped. “And I was angry when I realised, but I wounded you too, Loki, repeatedly. _Ek ann __þik_. Come back to me.”

“And be imprisoned? I think not.”

“Damn you, Loki,” Thor said. “_Ger_ _þú eigi þetta_, this is not something you can return from.”

“So be it,” Loki gritted out, tired of this.

Thor stepped out and the sceptre seemed to all but drag itself out of Loki’s hand in its eagerness to kill, blasting a flaming blue missile at Thor, who just _stood_ there, the imbecile. Loki was frozen in shock, the release of power feeling like an electric shock down his spine followed by a weakness that made his knees threaten to fold.

But the blue fire never struck Thor, never even reached him but was caught in the air by a shimmer of pomegranate-red energy.

_Magic user_, Loki thought, despairing. 

He thrust the sceptre out in front of him desperately, cringing at the pain in his arm, in his shoulders, in his head.

“Show yourself!” he commanded.

“Loki-” Thor started, still apparently standing in the open, but a shimmering red veil shielded him and if Loki had not been so exhausted he would have seen it, recognised it.

“Quiet!” Loki ordered, his voice cracking. He was shaking. He stepped sideways, searching for where the red magic had come from, stilling when he saw the archer suspended in the air two feet above Loki’s head, frozen with his bow fully drawn. The air around the hovering mortal trembled with powerful magic and Loki swallowed thickly, fear congealing in his throat.

“Brother, surrender, I beg you-” Thor pleaded.

Loki’s mouth twisted into a thin line. “I do not pay attention to begging, you pathetic cretin.”

The bolt of red came at him with no warning and it was only centuries of training, of slipping out of hostile hands, that enabled him to lurch sideways, the sceptre rising of its accord to deflect the magic. The force of the attack knocked him backwards a step and Loki shoved fear down as the red magic left a crater in the wall behind him, sending up a cloud of cloying dust.

Loki wished to flicker away, to copy himself into ten and slip away to regroup, but the sceptre was desperate to kill and Loki’s own magic was depleted, exhausted. The little power he had remaining was taken up with channelling the sceptre, and not allowing it to subsume him entirely, as it would a mortal.

Then, a sudden red flicker before there was suddenly a woman hovering before him, clad in red, her eyes dark and determined. She threw out a shimmering wave at the same moment as the sceptre erupted with blue magic, bursting outwards with too much power, too fast, but Loki couldn’t stop it and he screamed as the force of it thundered inside his chest like it was ripping the viscera out from between his ribs, like nails in his lungs.

The deafening explosion of the two magics meeting barely registered over his agony, but when he forced his bleeding eyes open, he saw the pulsing, red wall of the woman’s magic forcing even the sceptre’s extortionate power back towards Loki and Loki choked on the blood in his mouth.

Gasping at air that tasted like metal and burning, Loki twisted the sceptre he hated so much and wrenched the magic inwards with a scream of despair. He didn’t have enough magic to control it; it was nothing but bloody-minded desperation that forced that murderous, poisonous magic to shield him.

Blood in his airways, in his eyes, in his ears, Loki sank to the floor, clinging to the seething magic that had no loyalty to him and dragged it around him in a protective shield for the long, long second before the wall of red magic struck him like an explosion, punching through him and flinging him violently airborne as a storm of magic seethed around them.

_Thor-_ he thought, afraid. A blur of red and grey rushed across his vision, and then the ground slammed into him and knocked him into darkness.

*

Loki convulsed on a cough, splattering blood and filth as he dragged in the singed air, his throat raw. His fingers curled, bloody fingernails clawing at the dust-smeared concrete as he keened, feeling like something inside him had been pulverised. His magic was depleted, shattered.

“…Loki?”

Loki prised his eyes open and flinched at the haze of red hovering somewhere to his right. He tried to roll over, to drag himself upright, but Thor was suddenly crouched beside him, pressing a hand to his shoulder. He felt crushed, sickened by the blood in his mouth.

“Easy, brother,” Thor said. Loki’s left ear was clogged with blood but he heard Thor well enough.

He blinked, trying to clear his vision, and stared up at the woman who wielded her blood-red magic; mortal, and yet stronger than the sceptre. Loki stared warily at her and she looked coldly back at him, eyes narrowed. A ball of red magic fizzled in her hand, tendril curling around her wrist.

Loki forced himself up to his elbow with a gritted snarl, ignoring Thor’s protests, and cast his gaze around for the sceptre but he couldn’t see it-

“Looking for this, princess?”

Loki turned his head in the voice’s direction with a jerk, tensing up at the sight of the Man of Iron, sceptre held aloft in his metal-clad hand. A smirk twitched coldly on his lips, stiff with obvious hate.

Loki shifted, afraid he was going to be sick, and the woman in red twitched, her magic flaring threatening. Loki raised a shaking hand, Thor gripping his shoulder.

“Damn you all,” Loki said weakly. He was done. It was over.

He slumped back, blood trickling from his nose, and wasn’t awake to feel Thor lift him, carrying him carefully away.

**Author's Note:**

> _ Finna ok drépa hann _ – Find and kill him  
_ Ek ann þik _ – I love you  
_ Ger þú eigi þetta _ – Do not do this  
(I'm pretty sure the bottom two are okay-ish, the top one..ehhh. Maybe it should be ‘Finna hann ok..’ and I’m not sure the endings are right. I’ve only done a very tiny bit of Old Norse study and the grammar is hard - if anyone knows ON better, pls do correct me!)
> 
> Welp! What do you think happened after Thor carried Loki off? I'm thinking something outrageously fluffy, but it could turn angsty ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ up to you! Feedback welcome! :))


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